Content area
Abstract
Email is a dominant communication medium used in the organizations today. It has come to replace much of the face to face and telephone communication that was traditionally used in the workplace. As a result, certain advantages and disadvantages of email communication have had pervasive effects on organizational communication and business as a whole. The purpose of this study was to identify many of the effects email has had on organizations, namely those that were caused by Email Overload: Information overload, as well as other negative characteristics of email. These effects were compared to job satisfaction data that was gathered to identify whether a linkage between Email Overload and general job satisfaction exist. The study measured perceptions of Email Overload, as well as negative effects of email overload as they were related to the receipt of email messages better suited for other communication mediums, the use of technological tools, the amount of time spent on email and the email traffic one experiences. A sample of university faculty were used as their email use appeared to be a fairly close representation of that for typical organizational members.
Predominantly through the examination of descriptive statistics and correlation analyses of 85 respondents results were attained that helped illustrate the nature of email overload. As expected, respondents were heavy email users on average, spending 2.5 hours on email each day (measured in minutes, M= 150, SD = 107), received 39 emails per day, responded to 18 emails per day (M= 17.93, SD = 15.26), originated 9 emails per day (M= 9.34, SD = 8,35), and holding over 292 email messages in their inbox (M= 292.51, SD = 622.58). A strong correlation was found between perceptions of email overload also experienced negative effects of email overload meaning (r = 0.77). A weak negative correlation exists between job satisfaction and both perceptions of email overload ( r = -0.21) and negative effects of email overload (r = -0.17). Average email traffic had a deleterious impact on perceptions of email overload (r = 0.37), and negative effects of email overload (r = 0.32). Receipt of inappropriate messages was found to be unrelated to either perceptions of email overload or the negative effects of email overload. Theoretical implications, practical implications and limitations are discussed and recommendations for the future study of email behavior are offered.
